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I was raised in a religious atheist home, where the religion was a mix of ex Orthodox Jew and Mid Victorian Stalinism/Zionism which are pretty much overlapping.
mid-Victorian
(mid′vik tôr′ē ən)
.
mid-Victorian
(mid′vik tôr′ē ən)
adjective
- of, like, or characteristic of the middle part of Queen Victoria's reign in Great Britain (c. 1850-90) or the culture, morals, or art of this period
- old-fashioned, prudish, morally strict, stuffy, etc.
noun
- a person who lived during this period
- a person of mid-Victorian ideas, manners, attitudes, e.
So I was taught against sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, abortion, escapist abuse of substances and so forth.
Regarding Homosexuality my parents mouthed stuff about not using the public toilets in the subway system because homosexuals lurked to recruit boys, they having been recruited in a similar manner, or having been poor then having sold themselves to homosexuals and learned to like it. Rounding it out there were indeed pedophiles who had approached me and friends of mine at various times as I exercised a great independence of movement and travel on the buses, subways and streets starting at around age eight. (This was not uncommon in those days, almost sixty years ago.) In a more modern time I would have been grabbed by the cops, turned over to the baby snatchers along with my little sister and my parents would have been arrested. Also there was the matter of Bino, my camp counselor at Boys Club camp.
I was raised though to believe it wrong to torment, tease or harass homosexuals, just best to stay away from them.
Then the sixties. I was a bit jealous that homosexuals got a free pass out of the military draft. I knew some homosexuals who were in the army anyhow. It didn't occur to me that perhaps they had strived to conceal this from the army shrinks not because they wanted to serve but for the same reasons I would not lie and claim to be one in order to avoid the draft: stigma and perceived unemployability for having such a stain on my "permanent record." (There was no "gay" then that I can recall.)
I got active by way of a front group called "The American Servicemen's Union" in Workers World Party, and though I never formally joined there was a point they started calling me "comrade" and asking me to do this or that which most of the time I'd at least try to do. They trusted me to edit the monthly "newspaper" (The Bond) that we mailed out by a few thousand copies monthly to members of the military. This and starting to pay voluntary nominal dues and i suppose at some point I "joined." When I joined, WWP hAd a similar reputation as did Revolutionary Union and other groups of the "far left" - mid Victorian officially, though quite a few members lived in no such way.
ne fine day the official position on gays changed or was made clear to me. "Comrade so and so is gay and he is a good comrade." And I couldn't argue with that.
Around those days (my aging memories blur things a bit) the Black Panther Party was engaged in pushing and shoving matches with Gay Liberation Front members and my natural inclination was to believe that the BPP was within its rights for example to proclaim that homosexuals (they'd use more street like idioms) ought not be teachers in schools where Black children attended. " Cuba, which I admired, said that homosexuality was a disease to be treated and the Vietnamese revolutionaries denied that any such behavior existed in their realm. That was the old time religion.
The GLF by the way had as one member a guy who had been a friend of mine and who had "come put" much to my shock and disbelief during the time I was away in the army. I met up with him once after that, but it was too awkward a situation for me and I never made another contact with him.
The GLF took the position that being gay was not at all involuntary but that it was a decision, and a correct one for any revolutionary to take. This made me quite not comfortable and I guess that was the point in part. It was though a flip side to the old time religion in that it was saying that gays chose to go against nature and morals and ethics by certain translations.
Anyhow skip past those days. We've had the Stonewall riots, more and more people you'd say were educated and progress minded were endorsing "gay rights" and at one point it became more or less the consensus on the left. Then of course not too long ago our center right First Black President endorsed the right of gay people to marry each other which I felt was one of a few good reasons to oppose his opponent.
Wokers World then is a horse of a quite different color. I don't know how they deal with Stalin vs, Trotsky either publicly or internally. In my time they were trying to be secret Trotskyists, self avowed (pro) Maoists with an unusual pro Soviet leaning. I guess their old time religiosity (they did not in honesty shout it from the roof tops, it simply was understood to be the religion at the time) had to do with their trying to campflage the fact that they didn't much like or respect Stalin at all but thought that the people they wanted to align with did.
Anyhow after all the sound a fury WWP leader Larry Holmes gets 500 views on You Tube over the course of a year, and Bob Avakian fails to fill a movie show at the Magic Johnson theater after two years of exertion. Who knew?
